I am looking for an individual who is willing to guide me in my pursuit to publish my research in Behavioral Accounting. My study looks into the phenomenon of First Year Shock (FYS) and how it affects firm dynamics and the personal motivation of the new hire in industry. I completed the orignal study in my dissertation and presented the results at the GAAE Annual Meeting in February where it was positively received. I am now in the proocess of performing a 2 year update with the same population to confirm my original results. I believe I will be successful and I want to publish those results; however, I have never published an article in the top journals and I do not have anyone at my organization who can mentor me in the process. Thus, I need guidance and I'm turning to my AAA brethren to set me on the right path and assist with the editing process.

I appreciate this AAA community and look forward to the opportunity of adding value to the knowledge base. I will be glad to send more information to anyone interested.

Before starting at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I received corporate training and mentorship that was largely directive. My managers told me what to do and I did it. When it came time for longer-term career advice, my managers encouraged me to follow in their footsteps.

Our dynamic, global economy demands creative leaders who are able to forge new paths. Mentorship must be more about empowering the mentee than about shaping the mentee to be like the mentor. It wasn't until I arrived at business school that my mentors stopped telling me what to do and started asking me questions. My mentors went from "advising" me to "coaching" me. What were my priorities? Where did I want to be in five, ten, twenty years? How did I define a successful, impactful life?

Daniel Goleman's research in the Harvard Business Review points out that the best managers must have several styles to be most effective. He points out that the "coaching" style -- acting more like a counselor than a traditional boss -- is used least often because it is the hardest, not because it is the least effective. Coaching requires managers to focus primarily on the personal development of their employees and not just work-related tasks. It requires managers to tolerate "short-term failure if it furthers long-term learning." Goleman points out that the coaching style ultimately delivers bottom-line results.

I was selected to be an Arbuckle Leadership Fellow at Stanford, a cohort of MBAs employing the coaching style to mentor other MBAs. I started the program from the perspective that my professor Carole Robin repeated over and over: our "coachees" were "creative, resourceful, and whole." I can listen deeply, ask provocative questions, use my intuition, reframe the problem, etc. But I don't need to tell them the answer in order to be an effective leader.

I was randomly assigned nine first-year MBA students to coach, all from different backgrounds. I would meet one-on-one with each of them over coffee for an hour at a time. We would talk about everything from their transition to business school life to their romantic lives to career issues. "What should I do?" they each asked. But I wouldn't tell them the answer. I would ask questions and try to help them find an answer on their own.

"Why don't you just tell me what to do?" was a common refrain from my coachees. Eventually the coachees internalized that I worked to understand their perspective and to help them find the answer on their own. Intellectual independence then bred empowerment. I watched a quiet student transform into a powerful presence in front of an executive audience.

I still had a nagging question: would the coaching style only work at business school? Could I still be a successful coaching manager and resist giving the answers in a real-world situation with deadlines, budget pressures, and valuable relationships on the line? In the run-up to the Out for Undergrad Tech Conference this February, I coached the direct reports on my team. When I fielded a question, my first instinct was to ask, "What do you think?" One of the volunteers on my team, a successful young professional at one of the hottest Silicon Valley companies, was frustrated at first, just as my MBA coachees were. But just like the Stanford MBAs, he too began to internalize that he could come up with the answers on his own. As soon as he would ask a question, he would pause, acknowledge he was thinking through an answer, and offer a solution.

Employees are motivated by more than money, and autonomy and purpose are two large motivating factors. As the global war for talent grows ever more competitive, the need to cultivate and hold onto talent is paramount. Coaching results in more autonomous employees who are able to find meaning in their work and see the purpose of their actions.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Mentoring may be even more of a problem in doctoral programs. One of my better former Trinity graduates was in the latter stages of an accounting doctoral program when his mentor advised him not to try to be too creative when proposing a dissertation and doing research on up to the point of receiving tenure. The mentor's advice was to crank out General Linear Model regression studies that are safe even if they were not very creative or exciting. Supposedly real attempts at creativity might be wasted time until tenure was attained.